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Hackers Are Hiding Espionage Infrastructure Inside Ordinary-Looking Casino Websites

Infoblox links China-aligned APT PeckBirdy C2 infrastructure hidden in casino and adult websites targeting Asian government, finance, IT, and education sectors.

Infoblox researchers report that China-aligned APT groups have used casino and adult websites as cover for PeckBirdy, a JavaScript command-and-control framework active since 2023. The sites embed C2 servers, register service workers for persistence, and serve fake browser-update prompts delivering backdoors capable of running commands, stealing credentials, and providing remote access. Targeted sectors across Asia include education, IT, banking, financial services, and government. Just over 3% of Infoblox enterprise customers resolved at least one PeckBirdy C2 domain, with detection coverage on VirusTotal ranging from 13 detections to none.

Chinese-Speaking Hackers Use Noodle RAT Backdoor to Spy on Windows and Linux Systems

Chinese-speaking actors use cross-platform Noodle RAT backdoor to maintain covert access to Windows and Linux systems across Asia-Pacific.

Noodle RAT (also ANGYREBEL/Nood RAT) has been active since at least mid-2016 and was long misidentified as Gh0st RAT or Rekoobe variants until Trend Micro and Cyberint classified it as a distinct multi-platform family. The Windows build (Win.NOODLERAT) is an in-memory modular shellcode backdoor delivered via MULTIDROP and MICROLOAD loaders, while the Linux build supports reverse shells, SOCKS tunneling, and cron persistence after web shell or public-facing service exploitation. It has appeared in intrusions in Thailand, India, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan and is linked to Iron Tiger, Calypso APT, Rocke, and Cloud Snooper campaigns spanning espionage and cybercrime. Recently discovered Linux builders 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 indicate the toolkit remains actively maintained.

GBHackersupdated · 5h agofirst · 7h agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: July 21, 2026

Help Net Security lists current cybersecurity openings at Stellantis, Lloyds Banking Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other organizations across the US, UK, and Europe.

Help Net Security's July 21, 2026 roundup of cybersecurity job listings includes Application Security Analyst at Stellantis, CRISO at CRISO Trustyfy in the UAE, Head of Cyber Defence Centre at Lloyds Banking Group, and insider threat, compliance, and engineer roles across the US. Many listed positions are no longer accepting applications. The listing also promotes a guide on succeeding at cybersecurity job interviews.

Help Net Security · 13d agoIndustry

nex-agi/Nex-N2.5-mini — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

Nex-AGI releases Nex-N2.5 agentic model family (mini, Pro, Max) with a 1.6-trillion-parameter MoE Max, open weights, and hosted access via OpenRouter.

Nex-AGI launched Nex-N2.5, a family of agentic models in mini, Pro, and Max sizes, with the Max version built on a 1.6-trillion-parameter text-only Mixture-of-Experts foundation and the company's first complete post-training effort at trillion-parameter scale. The models target long-horizon computer use, web browsing, and visually grounded agentic tasks, with expanded agent training environments. Reported benchmarks include Max scoring 86.1 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 65.7 on SWE-Bench Pro, trailing Claude Opus 5. Weights are being released openly on Hugging Face and ModelScope, with hosted access through OpenRouter.

Hugging Face trending models · 8d agoModel release1

nex-agi/Nex-N2.5-Pro — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

Nex-AGI launches Nex-N2.5 agentic model family (mini/Pro/Max), with Max built on a 1.6-trillion-parameter MoE foundation.

Nex-AGI introduced Nex-N2.5, a next-generation family of agentic models in three sizes (mini, Pro, Max) focused on long-horizon agentic tasks including computer use, web browsing, and autonomous program execution. Nex-N2.5-Max is built on a 1.6-trillion-parameter text-only Mixture-of-Experts foundation, marking the company's first complete post-training effort at trillion-parameter scale. Weights will be released open-source on Hugging Face and ModelScope, with hosted access via OpenRouter. Benchmark comparisons against Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi-K3, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, and Qwen3.8-Max show competitive scores on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Pro, though weights were listed as "coming soon" at publication.

Hugging Face trending models · 8d agoModel release1

NIST Seeks Public Input on AI-Ready NVD Modernization

NIST is seeking public comment on modernizing the National Vulnerability Database to support AI-powered vulnerability research.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced it is soliciting public input on modernizing the National Vulnerability Database. The initiative aims to make the NVD AI-ready to support AI-powered vulnerability research and analysis.

Infosecurity Magazine · Aug 12, 2026Policy & legal

Right Tool, Right Job: Native-Language Evaluation, Tokenizer Sensitivity, and Methodological Findings from a French-Only BabyLM

French BabyLM entry METRON-FR (125M GPT-2, 92.47M words) shows tokenizer artifacts dominate child-scale zero-shot evaluation; proposes standard diagnostics.

METRON-FR is a 125M-parameter GPT-2 pretrained on 92.47M French words, submitted to the BabyLM 2026 Strict track, scoring 85.97% on the native Quebec-French QFrBLiMP benchmark and 62.80% on the BabyLM-weighted leaderboard. A cross-lingual GLUE protocol combining French task-data translation with rank-16 LoRA shows relational tasks gain while world-knowledge tasks regress. Bilingual Lexicon Induction reaches p@1 of 68.84%, 18x above chance, and ablations show single-token zero-shot scoring is dominated by tokenizer and template artifacts at child scale.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

France Establishes New Government-Focused Cyber Incident Response Unit

France created REACTIV, an ANSSI-led interministerial cyber incident response unit for state services, after the DGFiP breach exposed up to 678,000 taxpayers.

ANSSI announced REACTIV (Interministerial Response & Action against Data Breaches) on September 7, a dedicated incident response capability for French state services. It lets ANSSI require ministries to take urgent protective measures for citizens' data and lead centralized technical crisis communications during attacks on state services. The move follows the DGFiP tax authority attack that exposed data of 350,000 to 678,000 taxpayers, after which the Prime Minister ordered an extensive audit of ANSSI. Two suspects aged 16 and 18 from the ZeroBytes hacking group were arrested in late August.

Infosecurity Magazine · 8d agoPolicy & legal

From Parameters to Answers: How LLMs Retrieve and Use Their Internal Knowledge

Interpretability study traces how Qwen, Llama, and Gemma route query information and internal knowledge across layers when answering questions.

Researchers used layerwise interventions on hidden states to separate query-routing signals from target knowledge in language models, testing Qwen, Llama, and Gemma on country-continent questions with varied answer types. A pair-conditioned request direction strengthens before interventions alter downstream knowledge, opening a causal window while answer-supporting content is still forming. Trajectories differ by model: Gemma shows a partially overlapping mid-layer routing profile, while Llama has no sustained routing-effect window under the same gates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

Cohere Releases North Small Translate: A 218B MoE Translation Model That Scores 83.6 on WMT26 Across 50 Languages

Cohere released North Small Translate, an open-weight 218B MoE (25B active) translation model scoring 83.6 on WMT26 across 50 languages.

Cohere and Cohere Labs released North Small Translate, a decoder-only sparse Mixture-of-Experts translation model with 218B total and 25B active parameters, 128 experts with 8 activated per token plus shared experts, and 16K-token input and output context. In Cohere's vendor-reported WMT26 evaluation, judged by GPT-5.6-Sol, it scores 83.6 averaged across 50 languages (84.36 in an agentic multi-pass mode), ahead of DeepL NextGen (81.37), Qwen 3.5 397B A17B (81.56), GLM 5.2 (76.50), and Google Translate (68.20). The model was built with RWS's Language Weaver team, post-trained specifically for translation, and reports 112 output tokens per second versus 81 for Gemma 4 31B, with long-document xCOMET-XL scores of 48.9 versus 21.3 for Google Translate. It is available free on Cohere's Chat V2 API until rate limits, with three self-hosting checkpoints including a 4-bit NVFP4 variant running on 1x B200 or 2x H100.

MarkTechPost · 5d agoModel release

[dos] NanaZip 6.5 - DoS

A denial-of-service proof-of-concept targeting NanaZip 6.5 has been published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB entry 52656 contains a public proof-of-concept that triggers a denial-of-service condition in NanaZip 6.5. The listing is limited to the vulnerability title and does not include CVE identifiers or details on exploitation conditions. No evidence of in-the-wild exploitation is provided.

Exploit-DB · 29d agoExploit / PoC

FrostyGoop’s Zoom-In: A Closer Look into the Malware Artifacts, Behaviors and Network Communications

Unit 42 dissects FrostyGoop OT malware, which sent Modbus TCP commands to disrupt heating for 600+ apartment buildings in Ukraine.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed new FrostyGoop/BUSTLEBERM samples, the ninth known ICS-centric malware, first used against a Ukrainian municipal energy company by sending Modbus TCP commands to ENCO control devices. The attack caused a two-day heating outage affecting over 600 apartment buildings during sub-zero temperatures. The Go-compiled malware accepts Modbus register operations and timing parameters via command-line arguments or a JSON configuration file, uses an obscure open-source Modbus library, and checks the Windows BeingDebugged flag to evade debuggers. Unit 42 telemetry recorded over 1 million Modbus TCP devices exposed to the internet between September and October 2024.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoMalware in the wild

NIST wants to overhaul its vulnerability database for the AI age

NIST issued a Federal Register RFI seeking public input on overhauling the National Vulnerability Database for AI-scale, machine-consumable security data.

NIST published a request for information arguing the National Vulnerability Database must adapt as LLMs increasingly find and exploit vulnerabilities at machine scale. The RFI seeks input on integrating automation into vulnerability reporting, faster dissemination to defenders, and transparency and auditability in AI-driven decisions. It follows the White House-backed Gold Eagle clearinghouse at Treasury and the VINCE program with Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute for AI-discovered vulnerability reports.

CyberScoop · Aug 11, 2026Policy & legal

North Korean Hackers Tied to Rust Supply Chain Attack

Researchers linked a backdoor hidden in compromised Rust packages to North Korean actors' prior software supply chain attack campaigns.

Cybersecurity researchers attributed a malicious backdoor planted in compromised Rust packages to North Korean threat actors based on ties to earlier supply chain attacks. The campaign targets the open-source developer ecosystem, where infected packages can propagate downstream to developer build systems. The attribution suggests DPRK-aligned actors continue investing in open-source supply chain tradecraft.

Infosecurity Magazine · 26d agoThreat actor in the wild

NCP-ArchPreview Technical Report: Moving towards Latent Space Language Models through Next Concept Prediction

An 8.9B-parameter latent-space language model using next-concept prediction matches OLMo-3-7B pretraining loss with only 51.3% of the training tokens.

NCP-ArchPreview augments next-token prediction with Next Concept Prediction over a product-quantized concept vocabulary built from hidden states, trained jointly end-to-end. The 8.9B model was trained on 5.73T tokens from the Dolma-3 dataset, the largest latent-space language model demonstration to date. It consumes 51.3% of the tokens to reach OLMo-3-7B's final pretraining loss and outperforms it by 2.45 points on the downstream macro-average, including a 5.99-point GSM8K gain. The learned latent space also enables lightweight domain adaptation via a 17M-parameter VQ module and improves speculative drafting accepted length by 4.17%.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

Low-quality casino sites conceal highly dangerous threat actors

Infoblox reveals China-aligned APT groups hiding PeckBirdy malware C2 domains inside roughly 1.7 million Chinese-language illegal casino websites.

An Infoblox report says it tracks about 1.7 million Chinese-language casino sites enabling illegal gambling, some of which double as command-and-control infrastructure. China-aligned APT groups have hidden PeckBirdy framework C2 domains inside these low-quality casino sites since 2023, injecting scripts that display fake software update pages to deliver malware. Over 3 percent of Infoblox enterprise customers resolved at least one PeckBirdy C2 domain, and some sites rely on US cloud providers via 'infrastructure laundering.' Infoblox urges defenders not to dismiss casino-domain alerts as mere employee browsing violations.

The Register · Security · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

Competence-Gated Pooling of Language Models and Priors for Event Forecasting

Paper proposes a competence gate pooling language model forecasts with external priors, improving Brier score from 0.0771 to 0.0732 across 2,357 binary questions.

The paper defines a language model's relative competence as its marginal value beyond an available external forecast, and derives conditions under Brier loss where model disagreement improves that forecast. A competence gate estimates domain-level source weights from resolved outcomes, shrinks uncertain estimates toward a global weight, and recalibrates the pooled forecast. Across 2,357 resolved binary questions and five language models, it improves the external baseline from 0.0771 to 0.0732 Brier and beats global forecast combinations, though it defers to the market on ForecastBench. Across four Qwen models, verbal confidence failed to identify when the model outperformed the external forecast, while outcome-estimated competence supported better abstention.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Back-to-back N-able bugs send admins on a patching spree

CVE-2026-86218, a CVSS 10.0 pre-auth RCE in N-able N-central, is being exploited in the wild; Hotfix 4 mitigates it immediately.

N-able disclosed CVE-2026-86218 on September 6, a pre-authentication remote code execution flaw with CVSS 10.0 in its N-central RMM platform, and both N-able and Huntress report it is being exploited in the wild. It follows Huntress's disclosure of an exploit chain combining CVE-2026-86206 and CVE-2026-86207 that bypasses access controls to create unauthorized administrative accounts, investigated after a September 4 compromise of a fully patched customer environment. N-able has applied mitigations to all hosted N-central instances; on-premises customers must upgrade to Hotfix 4 (build 2026.3.1.14) immediately.

CSO Online · 9d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-86218CVE-2026-86206CVE-2026-86207+2 CVEs

Honeypot-Omaha and batch.py [Guest Diary], (Wed, Sep 2nd)

A SANS ISC guest diary describes batch.py, a Python tool that consolidates honeypot logs and enriches IOCs with threat intelligence data.

Written by a SANS.edu BACS intern, the diary explains analysis of the DShield Honeypot-Omaha sensor, which uses Cowrie to emulate SSH and Telnet and log attacker activity. The author's batch.py script implements a four-phase pipeline with SHA-256-generated master and guest authentication to consolidate JSON and log files, correlate data via external APIs, and produce MITRE, CVE, geolocation, threat-score and fingerprint enrichment for investigated indicators.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 13d agoTools1

Risky Bulletin: BEC campaign steals €35 million from French notaries

Hackers stole over €35 million from 500+ French notary offices in a four-year BEC campaign; ANSSI spent two years helping evict the attackers.

A business email compromise campaign breached more than 500 French notary offices — about 7% of all French notaries per the Conseil Supérieur du Notariat — over four years, stealing more than €35 million by phishing initial access and silently modifying wire transfer details. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI worked for two years behind the scenes to help notaries remove the persistent attackers, who had deep access; officials also feared hackers could issue fake notarized acts such as marriage certificates or forged real estate deals. No forged documents have been found so far, but notaries have added two-factor authentication and in-person requirements for banking details, and banks added extra checks in 2024. The newsletter also notes other incidents, including a $320 million Bitcoin extraction from Blockstream's Liquid Network and a JetBrains Cadence breach via TeamCity servers.

Risky Business News · 9d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

North Korean IT Workers Scheme: Detection IOCs and Tactics for Government and Corporate SOCs

ANY.RUN details the expanding North Korean IT worker infiltration scheme using forged identities and AI-assisted workflows, sharing detection IOCs for SOCs.

ANY.RUN describes how North Korean IT workers infiltrate American and European organizations using forged identities and AI-assisted workflows to become trusted insiders. The operation bypasses traditional security perimeters and has expanded beyond the private sector to government targets. The post provides detection IOCs and tactics for government and corporate SOCs.

ANY.RUN · 27d agoThreat actor

🔬“We have foundation models for language, not for physics” — Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing

Caltech professor Anima Anandkumar discusses Neural Operators and FourCastNet for physics modeling, arguing inductive biases beat pure token scaling.

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor at Caltech and co-founder of Accelerated Understanding, describes Fourier Neural Operators that learn in frequency and spherical-harmonic domains to model weather, fusion, and fluid or heat flow. Her team built FourCastNet 3, a global weather model competitive with physics-based simulations that runs on consumer-grade GPUs. She also introduced TorchLean, a framework for writing PyTorch-style networks inside the Lean proof assistant for formal verification, and was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board. She argues physical domains resist scaling due to tiny datasets and context lengths in the hundreds of billions, so progress comes from built-in structure and physical priors.

Latent Space · 21d agoAI research1

TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-4B — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

TokenRhythm releases NeoHorse-1-4B, an Apache-2.0 agentic fine-tune of Qwen3.5-4B claiming +5.93 benchmark macro-average gain.

NeoHorse-1-4B is a roughly 4B-parameter text-only causal language model post-trained by TokenRhythm from Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B for agent harnesses, tool use, coding, and instruction following. It applies routing-guided curriculum SFT and routing-guided on-policy distillation over execution trajectories as an early prototype toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). The release reports a 64.87 macro average across ten benchmarks versus 58.94 for Qwen3.5-4B (+5.93) and is distributed under Apache-2.0, trending #30 on Hugging Face.

Hugging Face trending models · 11d agoModel release1

Structural Jailbreaks Generalize but Do Not Compound: A cross-provider and multilingual study of Involuntary In-Context Learning

Researchers show IICL structural jailbreaks generalize to Google Gemini, lifting attack success to 80-100% on harm and financial benchmarks; non-English prompts attenuate it.

The study red-teams two Google Gemini models with Involuntary In-Context Learning (IICL), a structural jailbreak reframing harmful requests as the final cell of a data-labeling task. IICL lifts attack success from at most 6.7% to 80-90% on HarmBench and 97-100% on financial abuse (FinProof), an order of magnitude above prior results on OpenAI's GPT-5.4. Against a compounding hypothesis, forcing IICL output into Spanish, Hindi, or Arabic attenuates the attack in 11 of 12 conditions, attributed to a 'relevance curse' producing lower-quality harmful content in lower-resource languages. Findings replicate under an independent non-Google judge (Cohen's kappa 0.86 over 377 paired verdicts).

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security

Pre-Whitening and BCJR Posterior Distillation for Bi-LSTM Detection in Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling

Study shows nested-window Bi-LSTM architectures do not improve faster-than-Nyquist detection; pre-whitening plus BCJR distillation cuts bit error rates.

Across roughly 260 controlled trainings, processing nested intersymbol-interference windows in separate recurrent branches never significantly beat a plain Bi-LSTM at matched parameter budgets. The authors attribute the limitation to the observation model rather than architecture, and instead pre-whiten inputs and distill BCJR soft posteriors into the network. With 3.4% more parameters, the method reaches 1.05x the BCJR bit error rate at compression factor 0.8 and 1.89x at 0.7, improving to 1.47x with a wider whitened window.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

Rust Supply Chain Attack on arrayref: Significant Overlap with DPRK Campaigns

Malicious versions of the Rust crate arrayref executed a compile-time backdoor, with infrastructure overlapping recent DPRK supply chain attacks on Mastra and axios.

Wiz researchers report that malicious versions of the arrayref Rust crate ran a backdoor during compilation, compromising developer build pipelines. The campaign's command-and-control infrastructure significantly overlaps with infrastructure used in recent DPRK supply chain attacks, including campaigns against Mastra and axios. Developers using affected crate versions should audit their builds and review dependencies.

Wiz Blog · 27d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild1

New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic

Rapid7 found a new backdoor, ted, compiled into trojanized HAProxy at two South Korean organizations, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean actors.

Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit named ted compiled into the HAProxy load balancer binaries of two South Korean organizations in the automotive and media sectors. The implant intercepts web traffic, serves altered pages only to filtered visitors, and hides C2 exchanges from backend logs and HAProxy statistics; a companion RAT, curlRAT, beacons on a default 12-hour schedule. The toolkit also trojanizes crond, sshd, agetty, atd, and polkitd binaries and sanitizes logs and bash history. Rapid7 attributes the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with domain infrastructure overlapping APT37 listings in maltrail and delivery resembling the Operation SyncHole campaign.

The Hacker News · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild